When I was younger, I never thought I would become an advocate for women in our industry.
I never saw the need until I started to climb the career ladder. It was then when I tried to find female role models in travel tech, and I could barely find women at the C-suite level.
In 2020, Silvia Camarota from Expedia reached out to create Women in Travel Thrive and I was also fortunate enough to connect with two incredible, strong women: Laura Calin from Oracle Hospitality, and Noreen Henry from Sojern, women I profoundly admire.
Women are the primary decision-makers when it comes to travel — 70% of all decisions on travel are made by women. We also make up the majority of the travel and hospitality workforce — 54% to 65% of the tourism industry worldwide.
Our sector has almost twice as many women as other sectors, yet the number of women filling top roles is far from representative. Women make up less than 22% to 23% of our industry board seats and C-suite level, and only 1-in-31 CEO positions are held by women, according to the Castell Project. The reality is clear: We need more female role models in this business.
Several factors contribute to women not holding top positions in travel and hospitality. But what are the reasons why we lack women on top? The answer to me is related to three key elements: history, culture and unconscious bias.
When it comes to history, our involvement in the workforce is still quite recent. In fact, those who worked just a few decades ago were young and unmarried. It wasn’t till the 1970s when U.S. women employment reached 50% and 75% by the 1990s. Right before the pandemic, women held 50% of American jobs according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Culturally, the service sectors have traditionally offered the largest employment opportunities for women. Indeed, jobs that are somewhat associated with the notion of “care work” are perceived as feminine. In addition, we have always traditionally led household tasks, regardless of working or not.
That takes me to my third and most important statement about unconscious bias — those implicit stereotypes of particular qualities that we do not recognize exist because they are baked into hundreds if not thousands of years of culture and evolution.
When we think about this and what are the skills we tend to associate with leaders, those appear to be aligned and unconsciously associated with male characteristics such as: strength, toughness, ambition, power, dominance, competitiveness. But what about the following? Emotions, empathy, intuition and collaboration are attributes we immediately connect with the female kind and there is nothing we could do to prevent that.
This hit me earlier in my career when I was invited to an executive coach program to learn how to be more flexible. However, I am an immigrant, someone that fought for her dreams, moved to a different country, adapted to a new culture, a new way of life, made new friends and rose in my career in a foreign country I now call home. How could it be that I was not perceived as flexible? By definition I had to be.
When listening to Robin Hauser and her likability dilemma Ted Talk, that was the day I understood that active, eager and confident women could present themselves as “male” leaders, and therefore be less likable because those qualities are not perceived as traditional female attributes. Does that mean we have to be more masculine or less feminine to achieve our dreams? The answer is definitely no, what we have to understand is that those biases do exist, that is our reality as they do exist for all of us.
I also wanted to bring back a powerful and empowering HBO campaign that some of you might recall: So she did. It was launched in honor of Women’s Equality Day and it features HBO’s female actresses in front of and behind the camera. The campaign kicks off with women who have been told how too much a woman can be and if the alternative of being too much is being less of who you are, count them out. That is a strong message we should keep close to our hearts.
When I was a kid, I never felt limited, the sky was the limit. My mum taught me that I could aspire to become whatever I wanted as long as I was happy, true to myself and ready to work hard to achieve those dreams. She never doubted me.
We need to be able to still believe that is the case; we need to see ourselves through their eyes because we owe that to them and to those future generations that are eager to achieve their dreams, too. About 58% of women under 30 say career advancement has become an important core value in their life, and we have to help them, we have to build an equal industry where everyone can succeed regardless of gender and any other factor.
In today’s world, the best candidate should get the job, and unconscious bias can be changed so they no longer rule the world.
Mercedes Blanco is vice president of strategic partnerships at The Hotels Network and a founding member of Women in Travel Thrive.
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